Data furnace idea warms homes, crunches bits and bytes

In the world of computing, you cannot escape from this nemesis called “heat”. Yes sir, you might have one of those specially designed chassis on your notebook that does not have a warm palm rest when you work for hours on end, but the heat will have to settle down somewhere – and most of the time, it would be right there at the back of the notebook. Microsoft Research hopes to harness the loss of this energy form by looking for a way to heat up your homes.

While standard computers won’t be able to keep you nice and toasty on a particularly cold day, what happens when you take something far larger – such as server racks? Perhaps these servers could be used to power your huge business’ back end, while keeping the office warm at the same time, but chances are far higher that a custom heating solution in the form of the standard heater would be used instead.

One thing though – folks working at server farms might want to suggest to the management that during winter, they might want to find a way to channel all of that heat to the rest of the building in order to take advantage of the situation.